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Freeing Weezy…I Guess

I can finally sleep soundly. Li’l Wayne has FINALLY been released from Rikers. And it’s not a day too soon! Someone this clearly innocent shouldn’t have to spend a day in jail. I mean, have you even HEARD Tha Carter III, greater courts of the state of New York? Clearly you haven’t. The only thing this man is guilty of is having a silky-smooth flow and some odd, distorted voice thing in studio. And drinking syrup. And getting caught with a gun and some coke and some ecstasy.

This goes right along the same lines as other political prisoners who were wrongly jailed. We have the good Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, who was just sitting down somewhere and people were all like, “bro, you can’t sit there” and he was all like “whaaaa I can’t hear you through all this INJUSTICE YOU’RE THROWING IN MY FACE DUDE” and the cop was all like “BRO SERIOUSLY YOU CAN’T SIT THERE” then he put him in jail. Just like Wheezy. Or Hurricane Carter! Man, he was a really good boxer and people apparently didn’t recognize this skill enough and put him in jail for murder charges when he didn’t commit the murder. Luckily, super-talented Bob Dylan heard about the case and made a really good song about it AND mentioned how good of a boxer he was. The combination of those two talents finally made people see the light and set the Hurricane free.

And this is JUST like The West Memphis Three. Three teenage kids in West Memphis, Arkansas whose biggest crime was listening to heavy metal music and dressing in black. After two young boys were found brutally raped and murdered in the Arkansas woods, the police went looking for the culprits. Instead of looking for, y’know, clues at the crime scene, they went after the three kids in town who listened to metal and looked different. Those three were dragged into a pen and were battered until the cops found a weak link. Once it was found (Jessie Misskelley, who might be mentally handicapped) he was broken over hours of a brow-beating masked as an “interrogation,” and forced a confession out of him (without a parent or counsel present). The teenagers were charged with the murders.

There was no real concrete evidence linking the boys to the crime. The only thing the prosecution had in their pockets was to drum-up fear mongering based on the boys musical taste. Because they listened to Metallica, they must go into the woods and practice satanic worshiping ceremonies, and that’s just a stone’s throw away from taking a life, isn’t it? But of course. And when this concocted story is told to twelve bible-thumping, God-fearing jurors? Three guilty pleas come out. Damien Echols still sits in a cell, waiting on either a lethal injection to end his life or a miraculous escape from jail. With DNA samples taken from the scene it is possible that they could have the case overturned. The case that began in 1993.

But yeah, thank God Weezy–the guy carrying the gun and two different kinds of narcotics–is free to make awesome rap records. Justice is finally served.

For more information on the West Memphis Three, there are two films (with a third in production) called “Paradise Lost.” The series can be found on Netflix here and here or on Amazon here. You can find more information at the official and unofficial websites set up for the three, including “Free The West Memphis 3” and the West Memphis Three Support Fund.